Title

Author

Defense Date

Document Type

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Biostatistics

First Advisor

Nitai Mukhopadhyay

Second Advisor

Hugo Geoffrey

Third Advisor

Leroy Thacker

Fourth Advisor

Le Kang

Fifth Advisor

Shanshan Chen

Abstract

Modern big data often emerge as tensors. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to deal with datasets of large volume, high dimensionality, and complex structure. Therefore, it is important to develop algorithms such as low-rank tensor decomposition for data compression, dimensionality reduction, and approximation.

With the advancement in technology, high-dimensional images are becoming ubiquitous in the medical field. In lung radiation therapy, the respiratory motion of the lung introduces variabilities during treatment as the tumor inside the lung is moving, which brings challenges to the precise delivery of radiation to the tumor. Several approaches to quantifying this uncertainty propose using a model to formulate the motion through a mathematical function over time. [Li et al., 2011] uses principal component analysis (PCA) to propose one such model using each image as a long vector. However, the images come in a multidimensional arrays, and vectorization breaks the spatial structure. Driven by the needs to develop low-rank tensor decomposition and provided the 4DCT and Displacement Vector Field (DVF), we introduce two tensor decompositions, Population Value Decomposition (PVD) and Population Tucker Decomposition (PTD), to estimate the respiratory lung motion with high levels of accuracy and data compression. The first algorithm is a generalization of PVD [Crainiceanu et al., 2011] to higher order tensor. The second algorithm generalizes the concept of PVD using Tucker decomposition. Both algorithms are tested on clinical and phantom DVFs. New metrics for measuring the model performance are developed in our research. Results of the two new algorithms are compared to the result of the PCA algorithm.